IBM, Red Hat and Microsoft Team Up on Mission-Critical TP Apps - Open Source Software Up the Stack

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October 21, 2007
IBM, Red Hat and Microsoft Team Up on Mission-Critical TP Apps

I often get the question whether open source software (OSS) is “ready for prime time?” I typically use Google as an example and recite the litany of key line-of-business processes that Google has that are dependent on various types of OSS. Last week, an old-fashioned proof point was provided by the venerable Transaction Processing Performance Council, keeper of the holy grail of TPC benchmarks, the successor to the even more venerable credit/debit benchmark. Think of TPC as the people who run the ACID tests (as in are your transactions “atomic, consistent, isolated and durable?”).

Through the TPC, IBM announced that it has received what it claimed to be the highest TPC-C performance result ever achieved by a 4-processor server. The IBM System x3850 M2 was running DB2 with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Advanced Platform and 64-bit IBM DB2 9.5. The configuration achieved 516,752 tpmC on the benchmark. IBM System x3850 M2 with the Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processor X7350 2.93 Ghz (4 processors/16 core/16 threads) has an availability of March 14, 2008 (although the Red Hat part of the mix is available now).

Of course like MPG stickers on cars, TPC benchmarks come with caveats. As the TPC says “You must understand what the benchmark is intended to measure, before you can understand throughput. Throughput, in TPC terms, is a measure of maximum sustained system performance. In TPC-C, throughput is defined as how many New-Order transactions per minute a system generates while the system is executing four other transactions types (Payment, Order-Status, Delivery, and Stock-Level). All five TPC-C transactions have a certain user response time requirement, with the New-Order transaction response time set at 5 seconds.” Therefore, for the 516,752 tpmC number cited by IBM, a system is generating over a half-million New-Order transactions per minute while fulfilling the rest of the TPC-C transaction mix workload

Now the thing this OSS agnostic and open choice advocate admires is that this high-performance transaction load is monitored not through the equally venerable IBM Customer Information Control System (CICS), not through ATT/Novell/BEA Tuxedo, but through Microsoft Com+ (within Windows Server 2003 Web Edition) sitting out at the configuration’s 16 theoretical desktops. Whatever it takes should be the motto of IT folks.